Updates on life in Japan

Day 318 Making some back room deals there, Henry?

Well, surprise, surprise…

Electric power industry extended donations to major political parties

The electric power industry has contributed funds to major political parties, with management extending donations to the largest opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and labor unions providing funds to the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

Executives of nine utilities that own nuclear power stations and their subsidiaries are believed to have extended approximately 80 million yen to the LDP in 2009 and 2010 as individuals. Twenty-one organizations — labor unions at power suppliers and their affiliated political organizations — provided at least 68.76 million yen to the DPJ’s branches and individual legislators belonging to the party over the same period.

I’m no scientist, and I think this needs a great deal more explanation than is given here, but it’s worth watching the video. It is clear that there were fires before and after the quake. Have a look for yourself below.

Earthquake at Fukushima : could it be an hydrogen explosion ?

Posted by i-mochizuki on January 24th, 2012

There is a lot of suspicion that earthquakes at Fukushima could behydrovolcanic explosions or hydrogen explosions.
This afternoon again, an earthquake has hit the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. Its magnitude was 4.5

You can see the earthquake on this video (accelerated 4 times), at 1.55 minutes :

Following the earthquake, some lights began to grow and to swing at the feet of a tower, indicating a possible fire. You can see those possible “flammes” on the rest of the video.

But what is even more interesting, is that the lights “dancing” at the feet of the tower appeared first at 1.28 minutes. If you think that those lights are a fire, then the fire began before the earthquake. And so the earthquake could be actually an hydrogen explosion…

All MEXT monitoring stations in and around the greater Tokyo area showed significant spikes in radiation. This includes Tokyo (Shinjuku), Saitama, Kaangawa, Chiba, and Ibaraki.

Yesterday’s M5.1 quake in Fukushima occurred at 8:45p, about 30 minutes after a M4.5 hit nearby. The charts at the bottom give a more precise idea of the timing of the radiation spikes measured throughout the Tokyo area.

The head of the delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) currently visiting Japan has said Japan alone should decide whether to restart the reactors in Japan after the “stress test”. The IAEA is to examine the ways the “stress test” has been carried out, and to visit two nuclear power plants whose “stress tests” have been “successfully” concluded.

My guess: A ringing endorsement of the way the “stress test” have been done by the Japanese government, with a few pieces of kindly advice on how to further improve.

There are still Japanese citizens who think IAEA will somehow rein in the Japanese government’s drive to re-start the nuclear power plants despite stiff citizen-level oppositions. Sorry. And wake up.

Ministry of the Environment Seems to Have Outsourced Telephone Answering on Disaster Debris

Citizens in Japan have been calling the Ministry of the Environment directly, asking questions about the Ministry’s dubious policy of spreading disaster (and radioactive) debris from Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures throughout Japan to be burned and buried and recycled. To their puzzlement, people who answer the calls from the citizens at the Ministry don’t seem to know much about anything.

TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa No. 5 Reactor to Go Offline Wed.

Tokyo, Jan. 24 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo Electric Power Co. <9501> said Tuesday that it will halt the 1.1-million-kilowatt No. 5 reactor at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture, central Japan, on Wednesday for routine checks.
As a result, 16 of the company’s 17 reactors, including the six at its disaster-crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant, will be out of operation. The 1.35-million-kilowatt No. 6 reactor at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant will be the only one still running.
TEPCO aims to keep its supply capacity for this winter 4-6 pct above the maximum power demand in its service area mainly in the Kanto region, including Tokyo, by fully operating its thermal power plants.
But as the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa No. 6 reactor is scheduled to go offline in March due to regular inspections and no prospect is in sight for resuming the reactors, its supply capacity is expected to be 4.9 pct short of peak demand in summer this year.
Nuclear reactors in Japan are required by law to undergo checks every 13 months.

(2012/01/24-19:52)

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And finally, this informative article on the recent PBS episode of Frontline, “Nuclear Aftershocks”, found on the SimplyInfo web site at:

Frontline Episode on Fukushima & Nuclear Safety Misses On Details

January 24th, 2012

PBS show Frontline recently did an episode “Nuclear Aftershocks” on the Fukushima nuclear disaster and US nuclear safety. The feedback after the premiere on Twitter wasn’t very kind. Many weighed in dismissing the entire piece as “pro-nuclear propaganda”. The information in the show itself was not necessarily a PR piece for the nuclear industry as some on Twitter complained but it did have a few missing important details and some miss-statements that were misleading.

Before going more into the show, the “show” after the premiere on Twitter was probably more enlightening than the show itself. Under the #frontline tag on Twitter people were encouraged to discuss the show but what people encountered on Twitter was a flurry of PR propaganda from the nuclear industry lobby group NEI, Areva and Entergy. The tweets ranged from standard pro-nuclear platitudes to outright fabrication. The group of PR accounts refused to respond to any actual questions posed about specific public concerns like spent fuel safety, post Fukushima safety upgrades, failed GE venting systems and renewable energy. The only actual responses came in the form of standard industry ad hominem attacks on people asking questions. When they realized they couldn’t control the conversation the PR accounts stopped tweeting. This was an interesting real time peek inside the tactics of the nuclear industry to manipulate the public, but it doesn’t stand up well to open debate.

A live chat was held the following day on the PBS website. The chat involved the shows producers and a writer from Wired. They said they had over 200 people in the chat but only fielded a handful of questions. A number of people said they sent in multiple questions, only one of all of those was posted. The bulk of the live chat was the producers and the Wired writer talking to each other and prattling on about themselves. Maybe they don’t understand how a live chat (even a moderated Cover It LIve one) works.

The show itself starts with an overview of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster early events. Then it focuses more on Indian Point near New York City. The show does point out the unaddressed risk of having an old unsafe reactor on a fault line just outside the US’s largest city. It would simply be impossible to evacuate New York City if Indian Point ever had a major accident. The show leaves the viewer there to decide for themselves what would actually happen in NYC. In between they interview a variety of people, most were US nuclear industry insiders.

Probably the biggest concern or comment from our members that watched the show were the inaccuracies.
The series of omissions and errors with fact check:

“That emergency generators were on the seafront”
** this may have had to do with the way they worded it but was vague and gave the impression they were saying this
Fact check: Emergency diesel generators are inside the buildings but in basements, this lead to the flooding.

“That the risk of cancer is very very small”
Fact check: 1 in every 100 young girls exposed to 20 mSv annually could develop cancer, based on BEIR VII
* The issue of cancer risk and safe levels of exposure is highly debated. Many established experts admit we still do not fully understand exposure, cancer risk
and the impact of chronic low dose radiation exposure. Even with a set of numerical odds given, expecting someone to purposely accept that risk that they might
be that person to develop cancer out of the population is a ridiculous proposition.

Among other issues with this omission of renewables and the claims of a dire need for either nuclear or coal is the omission of the spent fuel issue. The US currently has spent fuel pools so overloaded with decades of nuclear fuel that MIT wrote a paper about the public safety risk of storing all this unsecured near big cities. We currently have no storage plan for nuclear fuel.

The show itself omits some key facts. While some of it is understandable due to a limited time allotment, some were key facts that should have been included. Others that were key parts of the presentation were patently false such as the “nuclear or coal” as our only options and the downplaying of both risk and exposure.

The day after the show a moderated chat was conducted on the PBS website. Some of Miles O Brien’s statements were far from objective and outright misleading. It had hints of both arrogance and bias for the subject at hand, accusing the general public of being both fearful and stupid. Probably not the best way to gain public trust needed for successful science journalism. We saw how bad this kind of attitude and bias can be in the BBC’s Jim Al Kahlili episode of their science show Horizon. Ian Goddard debunks the episode here.

These are some of the comments Miles O Brien made during the live chat:

Miles: it probably has been overdone and the level at which a evacuation is triggered in Japan-20 Millisieverts of exposure per year is extremely low. I am certain the government of Japan would like to walk that one back. But it’s impossible to do that. The truth is the stress and anxiety of dislocating 180,000 people will pack a much greater health risk over the long term than if they stayed in an area that was contaminated at those levels.

Miles: it depends on who they are and where they live. If you’re a mother with young children who like to play in the dirt and maybe even little of it, you might rather live somewhere else. But if you’re older, you might rather be at home and except the slight additional dose of radiation over the remainder of your life. You might very well get cancer, but that could be from smoking or drinking or the big risk factor: obesity. So wherever you live, stay away from the cheeseburgers and french fries! They are a much bigger risk to our health than cesium.

Claiming that a bad diet is worse than the kinds of radiation exposure levels people are being subjected to in Japan smacks of US arrogance and indifference to the suffering of others. It also ignores the growing problem of cesium and other contamination showing up in the food supply in Japan. We already know that internal contamination is far worse than external exposure as the isotopes stay in the body for years or decades exposing the body from the inside. This claim that fatty food is equally as dangerous as the radiation issues in Japan is just very misleading.

Miles: people in general fear radiation in a way that is not connected to the statistical risks. There’s a lot of reasons for this including the fact that this technology was born with the creation of atomic bombs. But it is invisible and the consequences are frightening and people feel as if they can’t control it. More importantly: people fear what they do not understand. So it is important that we all strive to educate the public about this amazing, complex energy source.

This is the kind of disconnect and arrogance that science journalism is supposed to resolve. Sadly again, instead of more in depth facts the public is dismissed as ignorant and irrational. In a world where more and more people have direct access to factual information, live reporting and the same scientific studies as the science and technology communities do, claiming the public to be uninformed and ignorant is an outdated mindset. Science journalism should be engaging the more informed world rather than insulting them. The online communities usually know far more and far earlier than traditional media does. The meme of irrational fear vs. radiation is a very standard fall back tactic of the nuclear industry, hearing it out of a science journalist is concerning. Our experience out of the Fukushima disaster is that people become more concerned about radiation risks the more they know about the scientific and technical facts involved.

Miles: it’s about the carbon! we need to stop climate change. That should be the preeminent goal. The trace isotopes that come out of a nuclear power plant are not worth worrying about.

There are more than “trace isotopes” coming out of the operating nuclear plants in the world. Watts Bar nuclear plant in Georgia is producing tritium for the US nuclear weapons stockpile, crossing the line between peaceful civilian power generation and the arms race. 30,000 curies of tritium dumped into the river the local population uses for drinking water is certainly something to worry about. This statement also ignores the risk of spent nuclear fuel and the risk of yet another major nuclear disaster. It is also not a climate change or nuclear only debate. Since nuclear is only 9% of US power production and we have many other options that help tackle climate change.

Miles: the nuclear industry in the US could not exist without a full array of government subsidy-including indemnification. so your question really is you want to have nuclear power not. Because if the government were not in on this game it simply would not exist. It that the business model just does not stand well enough on its own.

This is one of the few honest statements on the issue. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized and simply is not profitable. So while the public is told that nuclear is cheap it ignores the portion of the cost those same consumers pay through taxes that go to pay for that “cheap energy”. But the question isn’t as simple as “do you want nuclear power or not”. While the public has been increasingly against nuclear power and even more so at the local level, government has been complicit in shoving it down the throats of consumers even where it is clear they do not want it. The battle overVermont Yankee is one such battle where the state and the population do not want an ancient nuclear plant to continue to operate but the government has assisted the private company that now owns it to go against the will of the people. There are clearly more than one option for energy policy in the US, the public needs more say in the process and decisions.

Many thanks to Peter Melzer, Mary W, Dean, MIA, Mid Valley and all the others who helped follow and analyze this Frontline episode.